


strike the sky until the sun bows

by penhaligon



Series: Watcher Kit [8]
Category: Pillars of Eternity
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-03
Updated: 2020-04-03
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:28:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23446249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/penhaligon/pseuds/penhaligon
Summary: Lost souls make for good company.
Relationships: Waidwen & The Watcher
Series: Watcher Kit [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1271783
Comments: 4
Kudos: 13





	strike the sky until the sun bows

**Author's Note:**

> Some more post-Ashen Maw Watcher, following [this](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23033755) and [this](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22473853/chapters/54943972).
> 
> Title is from [The Warpath](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJgizJROr5A) by Conner Youngblood.

The deck swelled gently beneath Kit's feet as she leaned against the railing and gazed out at the dark waters gliding past, hardly aware of the rolling motion. She'd sailed many a time in her life, and it hadn't taken her long to adjust once more. But something in her still lurched with melancholy as she gazed out at the horizon, a yearning that searched instinctively for... well, she wasn't sure. She was never sure. The Dyrwood, certainly. It had snuck up on her, somewhere in those five years. But she thought any old forest or mountain would do, any horizon that didn't end with the sea.

Sailing meant movement, constant and unceasing, travel from here to there and back again, and Kit didn't know when she'd gotten so tired of it. She didn't know when she'd started _wanting_ to plant roots, but sometimes she wondered if that was in her cards at all. Even at Caed Nua, something had been missing, and she'd never been able to put a name to it.

There was another family out there beyond the horizon, one that was hazy and undefined in her memory, that could've been kind or awful for all she knew. But she didn't think that was it.

The on-duty crew knew better than to disturb her. Eliam was at the helm, and Serafen was on watch, and a few others were milling about, but Serafen had only nodded as Kit had passed, brushing his mind up against hers just enough to know that she'd rather be left alone, though she knew that he was keeping an eye on her. And maybe that was the problem. There was no room for retreat on _The Defiant_. There was her cabin, small but comfortable, and yet not what she was looking for. There were no trees or caves to disappear into, no roads and no endless earth. There was only the endless water, with no place to plant her feet and no place to feel Eora turning beneath her.

Or maybe _that_ was the problem. That sense of the world, the planet, had never felt so distant, and she didn't know if it was a side effect of the sea, or of her soul having gone through the wringer and come out disordered. She couldn't remember if she'd ever felt anything like this on voyages past, and it bothered her.

The only time she'd felt that closeness lately had been near the luminous adra veins or Eothas, and so she'd hunted down both with a fervor. But that had come with its own cost.

"Never seen the ocean before," a voice said at her left, a hollow ringing like it came across a vast distance.

Kit didn't need to look to feel the rippling of the veil between the physical world and the ether, the tugging of her Watcher's tether to elsewhere. She gripped it carefully and pulled it open, in a manner of speaking, and when she glanced over, a form solidified beside her, mirroring her posture.

Waidwen was nearly a full decade younger than her and yet not, and he shifted his head to smile at her as he straightened. "I think I would have been scared of it, back when I was alive," he said conspiratorially, like there was a joke in the words, and as if to emphasize his point, he turned and put his back to the sea, leaning against the railing with hands in pockets. He was almost substantial in the dark and in her Watcher's eyes, his skin nearly the same tone as hers, except for the way the moonlight gave him an indistinct shimmer. "A bit too big, if you ask me."

Kit smiled too, and straightened as well, though she didn't turn away from the sea. Sometimes the crew found it unsettling when she talked to nothing. "How are you doing?" she asked. "After, ah-- all of that. I've been meaning to ask." She had never pieced a soul back together quite like that, and even now, she could see the glinting fracture lines, weak threads that could unravel all of him had she been any less careful about the weaving. He hadn't manifested like this before, even though it had been weeks since _The Defiant_ had departed from Harbinger's Watch. Like it had been too difficult until now.

"Kind of you to ask at all," Waidwen said, and he looked out over the deck, something wry tugging at his mouth. "I'm feeling less exploded, so that's good." He rubbed at his chest like it hurt, and she didn't think he was aware of the movement. "Though I guess you want to know because it's good data, right?"

Kit bit her lip. She'd gotten quite a bit of information on the Godhammer, back in the White Void, and some of it direct from him. "That's what I do," she said, a little apologetically.

But Waidwen only chuckled. "That's alright. I think we're all going need more of that, soon enough." He fell silent, then, something pensive thrumming throughout his essence, and Kit didn't say anything further. "Feels... stable," Waidwen said finally. "More than it did before. But it also feels like that's going end as soon as you let me go." He shifted and extended a hand, laying it along the railing. "Here."

When Kit took his hand, it didn't quite feel like holding onto something solid. But her fingers still met resistance, and it sparked against her skin as essence always did, resonant and flickering. The sense of the fracture lines deepened, and she pushed against them ever so gently with a Watcher's touch, assessing the way in which Waidwen's essence responded. It was still brittle, but not quite like it had been when she'd found him. But neither did that constitute healing. It was more like... a fixative, she thought, searching for a way to contextualize it. A fixative that hardened based on extended proximity to... her?

Even god-touched souls were subject to the same entropic dissolution, Kit thought. And gods, too, because Xoti was on to something about Eothas, but the only conclusion Kit could reach regarding the reason for it was that he'd spent too much time in the physical world, if the other gods were to be believed. So why were Awakened souls resistant to it? What part of the reincarnation process ensured that, and what, exactly, did the gods depend on to circumvent that dispersal?

No wonder they were so nervous.

"Sure you don't want to take notes?" Waidwen asked, a little mischievously.

Kit let go of his hand with a twitch of her mouth. "Later," she said. "But I think you're right." She studied his face as he returned his hand to his pocket. "Do you... _want_ me to let you go?"

Waidwen was quick to shake his head. "Nah," he said. "I wanted to thank you. I thought I might have wanted that at first, after I... woke up." Some of his humor faltered, a shadow that darted across his face under the starlight. "It's a tempting thought. Letting it all go, going back to oblivion. Forgetting it all. But then you offered for me to come with you, and now that I'm feeling more like myself, I'm glad for it. I never got a chance to see the world, even if I can hardly interact with it now." He flashed her another grin, but it didn't sit as easily on his face as his usual smiles seemed to.

That, Kit understood all too well, even if Waidwen wasn't voicing every troubled thought that simmered beneath the surface. She was in no mood to surrender any piece of herself either. "You can stay as long as you like," she said. There would be no going back to the cycle soon, anyway. Not for a long time.

There was... something else, in Waidwen's lingering smile and in his thoughts. He wanted something? "You _are_ kind," Waidwen said, definitely fishing for something now. "Though I get the sense that you don't feel the same."

Kit stiffened, and her hands tightened around the railing. Her eyes fixed on the horizon, where the starry sky met the sea, and it was suddenly too open, too boundless of a sight. Waidwen's thoughts weren't particularly difficult to follow, and there was no need to probe at them to do so. "Didn't just want to show up for a friendly chat, then?" Kit asked, sharper and more bitter than she meant to sound.

"Actually, that's about all I'm capable of offering at the moment," Waidwen said, as benign as ever. "And I think I owe it to you, after everything you've done for me. But just say the word, and I'll pop back into the ether."

Kit sighed. "Sorry," she said. She could feel more than a few eyes on her here and there, on-duty crew members not quite able to ignore their captain's strangeness. It was an abruptly lonely feeling, in a space where it should have been impossible to feel alone, and Waidwen didn't deserve to be the target of the aimless ire that arose every time something caught her off-guard. "I'm just--"

"Tense?"

"Yeah," Kit muttered, an unhappy smile tracing its way across her face. "That's one way to put it."

"Well, I know a thing or two about sharing space with a god," Waidwen said, and his near-translucent eyes were soft and sympathetic, "if you've got any questions."

Kit held onto the railing for a moment longer, deliberating, then straightened her shoulders and jerked her head. The tear in the ether fluttered shut, and it was a short walk back to her cabin, during which the crew pretended like they hadn't been staring. A sense of sea salt and amusement skimmed the surface of her thoughts like an ephemeral wave, Serafen's voice riding on it. _Talking to spirits again, Cap?_

 _Shut it,_ she told him, with no heat behind the words.

The Steward greeted her warmly, and the captain's cabin beyond was empty. Vela usually slept with her, but sometimes the girl took a shine to bunking with whoever was her favorite of the week, and this week, that happened to be Ydwin again. So had it been loneliness, after all, that had driven Kit out of her cabin in the middle of the night? Even though there had been one too many souls on the deck for her liking, but she hadn't cared for the lonely horizon, either?

Kit closed the door behind her and took in the sight of the two dogs, one cat, and one wurm that had promptly overrun most of the space in her bed in her absence, all sound asleep. It wasn't like she was alone in here anyway, but her directionless irritation softened somewhat when Waidwen appeared beside her once more with a rippling of the ether and immediately grinned at the tableau on the bed.

Kit took a seat at her desk as Waidwen wandered over to the bed to admire the creatures therein, and when he turned around, Kit had a leather-bound notebook open and a pen uncapped.

Waidwen blinked down at her. "I was kidding about the notes," he said, bemused.

"I never kid about note-taking," Kit said, deadpan.

When Waidwen laughed, it made him look that much younger. Shaking his head, he stepped forward and put his hands in his pockets again, gazing down curiously as Kit flipped to a page that wasn't already covered in scribbles. "What do you want to know, then?"

"I have some theories," Kit said, and she had to admit, she relaxed immediately, upon turning her thoughts to something they could grapple with. "I use that word loosely, mind you. Most of my evidence is anecdotal experience and secondhand accounts. Some of it from things I don't even trust."

The gods were certainly not reliable at offering consistent and truthful information, and she hadn't thought to ask Eothas about this. Not that she really trusted him all that much more than the others, but a stupid oversight nonetheless.

"It all comes back to understanding what the gods _are_ ," she continued. "They came from kith, but I've been thinking of them as a different species. So if I can establish some species-typical patterns, when it comes to how their essence behaves, then I can examine how that interacts with any other system, like kith or the Wheel. And that's important to a lot more than just me and you." Kit paused and took a breath. "Does that make sense?"

Waidwen stared at her, a single eyebrow arched. "Sure," he said indulgently. "But on second thought, you might know more about this than me."

Kit smiled, and she was surprised at how natural it felt. "I just need your account of... let's call them symptoms? You, I know I can trust, and comparing yours to mine will let me start isolating some factors." She came to a full stop, and the pen sank in her grip. "But... you don't _have_ to talk about it, you know. I know it was..." _Bad_ didn't even begin to cover it. She'd felt some of it herself, far too intimately, while reconstructing his soul.

"Oh, but now you've got _me_ curious," Waidwen said, and though a thread of reluctance ran through him, it was eclipsed by how genuine his voice was. "I have a question, though." At some point, his hands had come out of his pockets, and he'd folded his arms, though Kit couldn't remember seeing the transition -- an abrupt reminder that he wasn't actually _Here_ , in the capitalized sense, if the perpetual shimmering and lack of register in her cipher's senses weren't enough. "What was it like for you?"

The pen finished sinking, coming to rest against the parchment. Kit stared through Waidwen, just able to glimpse the dresser bolted to the far wall. Half of Crookspur was a blur, the faces of friend and foe alike clouded, and words exchanged as only a distant echo. The other half was achingly clear, the map of essence laid out in glistening, droning, irresistible lines. "I was... hungry."

"For what?" Waidwen prompted gently, when Kit hesitated.

Kit tapped at the edge of the pen, tipping it up and wrapping her fingers tightly around it when it fell into her palm. "Everything." With a small shake of her head, she looked up to meet Waidwen's gaze and restlessly twirled the pen between her fingers. "It's like... all of the excess got stripped away. There was just me and... the souls all around me, in their purest form. I could feel the geodesic paths between them too -- the shortest metaphysical routes, that is -- and it let me triple my reach. I could _feel_ so much more. I knew that I had to get rid of everything there, and I just... _wanted_. I almost," she paused and gritted her teeth, swallowing, "I almost hurt people I care about, because I couldn't see past that _want_."

Waidwen nodded slowly as Kit fell silent, and he didn't look surprised. "It felt right, didn't it?" he asked quietly.

Kit exhaled hard through her nose. "Yeah," she said, only a little miserably.

But Waidwen gazed at her with understanding. "I saw the same thing, when it was me and him together," he began carefully. "It was like we saw things as they really were, like there was no difference between... between bodies and souls. But for me... I just wanted it all to hurt as much as I did."

He spoke with a frankness that held Kit's attention riveted, but his face dropped gradually to the floor as he spoke, troubled and grieving. A deeper sorrow stirred beyond, rippling through everything that made him up.

"I wanted to make the world pay for hurting me," Waidwen said. "Not all the time, but whenever we were closest. It was like it brought out some... deep part of me, and then he wanted that too, and it got all mixed up with everything else he wanted. There was no thinking clearly then. It's why he started pulling away from me, but the damage was already done."

An echo of that anguish twisted away in him, a sharp memory of lonely confusion so strong that it had left an indelible mark, and Kit took a breath, steeling herself against the sense of it. "Taking the shape of the container," she murmured, and when Waidwen arched another eyebrow at her, she huffed. "It's an old philosophical debate. What state of matter essence is typically in. There are a few schools of thought that would swear up and down that it's primarily a liquid because it always conforms to the container it's in."

Waidwen frowned as he considered it, his arms unfolding. "It's not... really a liquid, is it?"

Kit laughed a bit at the confusion in the question. "No. Most scientists nowadays think that it's some other, fourth state, and I don't think anyone's agreed on a name for that. But molding to its vessel like a liquid is a good way to think about it. Essence gets... imprinted with the characteristics of the vessel and its environment, and brings its own characteristics too."

That, at least, was a well-documented phenomenon, one that enabled both individuality to persist and past lives to surface. But it didn't explain all of it.

"And gods aren't exempt from that, I guess," Kit said, and now she was straying into pure guesswork. "But I think maybe the essence of a god is meant to cut down to the bone, so to speak. To find the... _core_ of something." Kit paused, watching as Waidwen's face and essence sank deeper into melancholy, and she immediately regretted the words. "For the record... I don't think that's all you are. That... hurt, I mean. It was just the thing that first shaped you into _you_ , as opposed to formless essence."

She was very much aware of what that meant for her, too. The desire to know and reach for everything at any cost, the yearning she'd been raised with. All built upon a bedrock of lies, apparently, but that didn't change the fact that it was a yearning she felt even now, and she didn't have the luxury of understanding exactly where it began or ended. Maybe it was never-ending, and that was simply _her_ shape.

What would she have been like, if her mentor hadn't raised her? Or was there something wretched always in her cards, as far back as the Inquisitor?

"Well," Waidwen said, frowning down at the desk and the notebook, and not meeting her eyes, "that makes a certain amount of sense." He sighed, and his essence glimmered with it, flickering in the lamplight and the moonlight streaming through the porthole. "You're lucky, you know. You've got all those people who care about you. The real you. I..." his voice grew strained and faltered, "my mother didn't want anything to do with me, after a while. I don't blame her for that. I wouldn't have wanted anything to do with me, either. But Eothas was the only thing left that I loved, in the end, and that was no good for either of us. You might be on to something about environment and all. But I think that means you're better off than I was."

The pen stilled finally, as Kit ceased her endless twirling, and something very pensive of her own settled in her again. It was one factor that she could easily isolate, then: that somehow, a lone and loved voice had called her out of the maelstrom that had overtaken her at Crookspur. Maybe that bastard Galawain had a point, in all his talk of packs. There was something to be said for the way that essence was clearly predisposed to join before entropy kicked in, not separate.

"You loved him," Kit said. "You still love him."

"'Course I do," Waidwen said with that same frankness. "How could I not?"

"Do you forgive him?" Kit asked, before she could stop herself.

There was nothing angry in Waidwen now, nothing of the want he'd described. Maybe it had been blown right out of him, like parts of her had, only hers had come back with a vengeance. "I don't think that's what matters," Waidwen said, contemplative. "If I do, it's not because it's good or right. I never bought that rhetoric anyway. It's just because... I want to. It's for me, not him."

Kit swallowed, her thoughts inexorably drawn back to a dark place deep beneath the ground. To another spirit's voice, and Iovara's inexplicably enduring love for who Kit had once been, that carried over even into who Kit was now. Kit had never been able to make sense of it, but lately, that gap in understanding had been shrinking more and more. She was getting familiar with the feeling.

Did she forgive the god of light for doing something she never could, that she'd be sorely tempted to do if it was within her grasp? Because this way, she'd never have to dirty her hands like so, only fix what he'd bloodied?

Probably.

"He'd better grovel when we catch up again," she muttered.

And Waidwen threw his head back and laughed, then, much of his melancholy evaporating in the face of something that couldn't quite be extinguished. "That's not him," he said fondly.

There was something bright and infectious about him, because Kit couldn't help but smile in turn. She looked down at the notebook so as not to be blinded and finally registered that the page to which she'd flipped was still empty.

"I thought you were supposed to be taking notes," Waidwen said, following her gaze.

"Ah," Kit said. "Yeah. I got distracted."

But when she put pen to paper, nothing happened. A dozen thoughts were tumbling about in her head, too entangled to extract them into written form. The gods were a product of environment and vessel too, but what did that mean in the grand scheme of things? How different were they really, from kith? Was something like Woedica destined to seek domination? Was Eothas an inevitability or a divergence? If Eora itself really was their vessel, what would happen if the things inhabiting its core were removed or died out? Could they even successfully integrate with a new vessel at all, without a terrible cost? Where did the lines blur between essence and container, in the matter of gods?

That was the important thing, in understanding why a god and a mortal both would lose their grip on sanity when colliding. But she was no closer to understanding the mechanisms of it, even with Waidwen's account.

And just how much of Eothas had that broken piece of Kit's soul picked up while traveling with him? What would happen if she prodded at it, let alone integrated it further into herself? How would she even measure it? It wasn't nearly the same amount of essence that Waidwen had absorbed, but would she still end up like him, if she wasn't careful?

"I think you wanted to document symptoms," Waidwen offered.

"Right," Kit said, and she drew two columns. Two direct-from-subject samples did not for good data make, but she was working against millennia of lies and obfuscation. It would have to do for now.

The hazy memories and lost time and lessened need for sustenance that Waidwen described for her didn't make for more reassuring similarities, but as Kit jotted down everything she could remember and everything that Waidwen shared, she felt... better. Clearer, more focused, as if externalizing it like so kept it from polluting her thoughts. She let loose a heavy breath when she had a satisfying list across both columns, and when she'd made a note of her observations on the not-healing that was holding Waidwen's soul together, and she put the pen down decisively.

"That's good for now," Kit said at last. Even if she was itching to ask more questions, she knew better. Too much information at one time would only ensure that connections and insights were lost in the deluge. She looked up at Waidwen and tried to put her gratitude into words. "Thank you. This means... a lot."

"Happy to oblige," Waidwen said, his usual good humor intact, and Kit thought she felt the same thing mirrored in him: a relief, almost, a pressure released. He didn't say that it had helped him as much as it helped her, but she knew. She hoped. "I never had time for science that wasn't related to farming, but this is fascinating."

Kit closed the notebook and fastened the leather clasp once more. "What would you have wanted?" she asked, because Waidwen didn't seem to mind her insatiable curiosity. "If..." she winced even as she said it, "if you'd lived."

But Waidwen wasn't bothered by that either, and a thoughtful look came over his face. "I really don't know," he said after ruminating on it, and then he huffed wryly. "I was so unhappy before. It's hard to know what you want in that kind of state." It was yet another sentiment that Kit understood all too well, and she put the notebook back into a desk drawer and stood, as Waidwen shrugged and said, a little playfully, "Maybe I would have started a rebellion anyway."

Kit stepped around the desk and came to lean against it, beside him. It was nice, she thought, and oddly calming, even if he was only half-there. She'd often been grateful for the revelations that her Watcher's abilities had led her to, even if certain insights remained out of reach, but it wasn't often that she took the time to appreciate the smaller things too. Like chatting with the ghost of a long-dead saint, simply because he was easy to talk to. "Plenty of time for that still," she said lightly.

Waidwen glanced at her out of the corner of his eye and smiled, gleaming in the light. "What do you have in mind?"


End file.
